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This article presents a profile of painter David Hockney. Born in 1937 in Bradford, on the opposite, west side of Yorkshire, England Hockney grew up in a small industrial city that had seen better times. He fell in love with the Yorkshire wolds while cycling with his family on the local roads that rise and fall like thin black ribbons on top of a patchwork quilt of wheat and barley fields. As a teenager on summer school holiday, Hockney helped bring in the harvest at Huggate, a farming village nestled in the hollow of a hill.

The article talks about the efforts of Mattia Preti to replace the natural light at the Carmelites of Modena in Italy with a pictorial illusion, creating an extraordinary effect of unreality. The selection of Preti, whose name was probably unknown in Modena, can only be elaborated as a favorable response to his grandiose frescoes of the Martyrdom and Entombment of Saint Andrew uncovered in April 1651 in the apse of Sant' Andrea della Valle. Preti developed his style through the independent observation of the paintings displayed in Roman churches and palaces. Preti's earliest works reflect the influence of both Giovanni Lanfranco and Guercino.

The article discusses 16th-century still life painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio's work "Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge." Because of the popularity of his painting, the "Basket of Fruit," or Fiscella, they question whether he had done other still life, and this brought to light his work, "Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge." It is said that the painting "Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge," is provocative because it was inspired by Caravaggio's love affair with a prostitute named Maddalena Antognetti. According to historian Allen J. Grieco, the erotic nature of the imagery was intentional due to the fact that, in the 16th century, fruit was often the basis of erotically-inclined poetry.

The article discusses one of the longest controversies in Italian Renaissance painting, which involves artists Correggio and Bronzino. The "Apollo and Marsyas" in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in Russia, was one of Correggio's best known works when the Tsar's curators acquired it from Duca Antonio Litta in 1865. In 1871, Julius Meyer rejected the "Apollo and Marsyas" from his catalog of Correggio's paintings and proposed a Florentine origin for the painting. Eventually, the scholarly debate organized itself into two distinct factions, Correggio and Bronzino.